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Thursday, 5 September 2019

Eco-Fascisms and Eco-Socialisms

Garrett Hardin,
the biologist who aged into alignment with white nationalist politics, had the
dubious honor of having confected one of the most addlepated and incorrect
theories in the natural sciences. Hardin argued that amidst human tendency to
overbreed, societies would run rampant over common resources amidst a
Hobbesian-style resource grab: this is the “tragedy
of the commons.”

His solution to
this conundrum: individual property rights.

Yet, Hardin was
dead wrong. From the rainbow-hued historical
skeins of Peter Linebaugh to the heterodox institutional economics of
Elinor Ostrom to the historical ethno-botany of Kat Anderson,
we know scientifically and historiographically something long known by
populations that for eons had managed their commonwealths, including the
indigenous peoples of these lands: the problem is not collective mismanagement
of resources. They can handle that just fine. The problem is claiming otherwise
to justify theft.

Hardin drew on
a strain of “overpopulation” theory which harkened back to the arch-ideologue
of hatred of the destitute, Thomas Malthus. What Malthus wrote had no
connection to reality. It was a simple attack on the poor, blaming them in this
way and that for their own poverty.

Marx aimed
considerable artillery at Malthus, seeing in his work a distilled contempt for
the needy. A later Marx turned his attention to town-country rifts manifest
in lack of nutrient recycling. He saw imperialism magnifying and stretching
those rifts, displacing capitalism’s ecological consequences to the world’s
weak and poor – notably in Ireland and,
as he would come to see, the Americas.

Political
ecology, born in the 1980s, carried this insight further. Physical ecologies,
if sufficiently damaged by capitalism, could have diminished capacities to
support good lives for those who lived on them. And damage to the ecology
worked through class. Ecologically
unequal exchange reminds us that class also has a national aspect: the
core-periphery divide. Some national ecologies get more damaged than others.

The
Fascist Political Ecology of Climate

With IPCC
reports landing like forecasts for Armageddon on rare-earth powered laptops
world-wide, there is now widespread generational and civilizational concern
over anthropogenic climate change. Ecological arguments are back on the agenda.

But ecology is
not politics. Politics, as political ecology taught us, appears in diagnoses
and prescriptions for solutions.

From nativist
conservationist grassroots eco-fascism; modernizing authoritarian eco-fascism;
eco-socialisms based on environmentally unequal exchange and livelihoods and
social reproduction; eco-socialisms putting center-stage smallholders and
forest dwellers; modernization-curious eco-socialisms; and eco-modernist
manifestoes targeting moonshots, asteroid mining, factories in the
stars, and cascades of techno-fixes for the industrial capitalist
socio-ecological catastrophe, there is many a solution to the climate crisis
and the ecological crisis in which it is nested.

Each proposed
solution maps social power and powerless. Each offers a way to assess
culpability and innocence. And each, in zeroing in on social subjects for a
just – or unjust – transition, implies a politics.

Let’s start
with the bad politics. In just the most recent of a long list of manifestoes
written by eco-fascist mass murderers, the El Paso shooter’s manifesto welded
together Great Replacement Theory with concern over limited resources,
aggressive settler-nativism with concern with the environment. It represents
one “solution to environmental crisis: localist-curious eco-fascism based on
ethnic cleansing. This idea is not new, as the scribblings of Hardin attest.
Like a wraith, Malthus is back.

Such grassroots
eco-fascism has to be confronted. But it is far from likely to be the form in
which eco-fascism will come to the United States as an institutional
phenomenon.

It is good to
remember here what fascism is and is not, how it is like and unlike the
day-to-day crimes of non-fascist capitalism. As Aime Césaire reminded us, it was
run-of-the-mill European civilization, its “respectable
bourgeois,” which extirpated 90,000 in Madagascar, three million in
Indochina, and colonized the
US, pillaging and killing across the continent.

Fascism is an
extension and intensification of liberal capitalism. As Césaire reminded us,
and as Modi’s moves against Kashmir should
further remind us, fascism has historically had a colonial or expansionist
edge.

My bet is on
eco-fascism coming in the shape of a new socio-technical machine, a kind of
Fortress Eco-Nationalism: a zero-carbon-dioxide emitting way of life in which
either the wealthy or the entire population of the wealthy states will laager
up behind militarized seawalls and sea-lanes.

This is the
hellscape that the El Paso shooter imagines as a dreamscape: resources hoarded
for residents of the US – their numbers diminished via the violent expulsion of
Latin Americans. Perhaps bio-fuels swapped
in for petroleum, lithium batteries swapped in for internal combustion engines,
all occurring at a pace too slow and with too much carbon dioxide spent
on the transition to avert the transformation of much of the formerly
colonized world into barely-habitable sacrifice zones.

And as forests and fields become dead-zones,
people will flee, and as the trophic sphere shudders amid Silent Spring-levels
of bird, bee,
and insect die-off, even more will flee. And they will flee to the wealthy
North.

Populations may
also flee because the physical resources for industrial renewal will rest
on ripping
up chunks of the rest of the world through open-pit and strip-mines
alongside slurry ponds brimming with toxins.

They will also
flee as drought spreads across countries already hammered by Western
sanctions, like today’s Zimbabwe, or metropolises desiccated by unplanned
sprawl like Chennai, or the 25 percent of the world suffering
water stress. Fortress Eco-Nationalism is already in play. Some nations
suffer political-ecological distress and some can buffer it.

The foretastes
of such a future are right in front of us. Look at our southern border. Huge
numbers of the displaced are from Honduras, suffering under historic
drought, where a right-wing US coup d’état murdered environmental
activist Berta Caceres.

Right-wing
think-tanks have noticed this “threat.” They converge on a militarized approach
to socio-economic transformation, an obsessive interest in maintaining
industrial capitalism, disdain for sustainable and restorative agriculture, and
worry over immigration flows they consider unmanageable.

It goes without
saying that the right-wing Fortress Eco-Nationalists have no interest in
theories like that of environmentally unequal exchange (EUE). EUE teaches us
that prices, capitalism, and current technological packages are not easily
untangled.

Prices are the politically enforced symbolic
system through which environmental toxicity, hand-in-hand with current
technologies, concentrates in
the periphery whereas the “benefits”
concentrate in the core. Because accumulation occurs on a global scale,
populations in the core vastly out-consume populations in the periphery.

Yet,
bastardized notion of EUE, even if inchoately perceived, animates the El Paso
manifesto. The author is entirely aware that the US “way of life” relies on
large quantities of resources, a pattern which cannot
be shared globally.

The ecological
crisis will not stop at human-made borders. The consequences of biodiversity
loss and extinctions and the rising seas will care little for the concrete
walls and automated drones which may stop the human tide and even stem rising
waters – at least until they don’t. The multiplication of avian and porcine
flus, multi-drug-resistant bacteria, and fatal super-funguses heed
human-made border posts even less, and the idea of quarantines to keep out
viruses and fungi is a chimera.

Eco-Socialism
as a People’s Green New Deal

And what of
eco-socialism? Recent months have seen the idea of the Green New Deal become
widespread. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez laudably jumpstarted discussion of a
political response to climate changes amongst sectors that had previously not
been discussing it.

But reducing eco-socialism to the GND, or more to the
point, her GND, letting it blobbily envelop all conversation
in the core, comes with costs. Once everything has been absorbed in the
gelatinous mass, we will lose important distinctions between different brands
of eco-socialism.

For example,
eco-socialism mixed with notions of climate apartheid are good slogans, but
they do not tell us about what needs to change and how, nor do they seem to
effectively remind people that some of the countries suffering under
climate-linked drought are also suffering under politically-driven sanctions –
imperialism.

Pasting the
label eco-socialism onto plans for state-business partnerships and clean-tech
export – which, after all, are in the Ocasio-Cortez draft
legislation – does not clarify the distinction between a people’s GND
and that which Congress, pressured and pulled here and there by money, will try
to implement.

This is a
distinction worth drawing, since a state-business partnership based on industrial
renewal will likely end up having quite a lot more in common with eco-fascism
than internationalist eco-socialism.

It is here that
we should think about analytical tools like environmentally unequal exchange.
This is not a theory demanding castigation of northern consumerism. It is a
battle-map which reminds us that social change has to account for location in
order to include the most dispossessed.

And it is a reminder that programs for
eco-socialism should begin with the demands of the most dispossessed lest they
be left out of plans devised elsewhere, or more simply should such plans rest
on continued extraction and exploitation of the world’s poorest.

Following that,
EUE also points towards alliances. On the
one hand, the environmentalism
of the poor in the global periphery: agro-ecological smallholders who
produce much
of the world’s food on relatively
smaller amounts of the world’s land, and who,
alongside forest-dwellers, conserve wildly
disproportionate amounts of the world’s biodiversity. City-dwellers and
slum-dwellers in the Third World who wish to breathe air and drink water free
from the waste issuing from the kinds of development which
have failed to
produce First World –

Third World convergence. The periphery as a whole, which
still needs low-cost infrastructure and good homes, which need not imply
massive CO2 increases. On the other, people living in the First World
(including its internal
periphery).

Almost no one
seriously denies the
need for such an alliance, although many fruitlessly try to nibble
away at its socio-ecological logic, imagining the poorer world can somehow
mimic the Western path to “prosperity.” But if fighting eco-fascism means
eco-socialism, that means a program must allow unity-in-diversity.

Against the
eco-modernizers, it means taking as axioms and not debating points La Via
Campesina’s rejection
of bio-fuels. Against the re-born modernization theorists, it means taking
seriously the Third World’s need for massive agrarian reforms. Against those
who think agriculture does not matter, it means accepting that the fruits,
vegetables, and spices which people in the First World have gotten
used to would either have to be grown here or be bought at fair
prices.

And against those who think metals come from a philosopher’s stone, it
might mean that demands for stopping mining, as has happened in El
Salvador, could send metal-intensive GNDs back to the drawing board.

Nor does the
burden of transformation stop there. We as political subjects should not be
guilt-ridden consumers but also frustrated and open-minded producers. People in
countries like Canada and the US who wish for open borders need to seriously
reconsider the “way of life” (or way of death) which induces massive
migrations. Shifts in the Third and First Worlds are interwoven and iterative.

Retooling core
production also paves the way for material-use convergence between wealthier
and poorer countries – the basis for a just world. Luckily, development
indicators are breaking
free from energy use, which means such convergence could mean a good
life for everyone. This is not a call for an Arcadian fantasy, but for
sustainable cities, fit neatly into their bio-regions, alongside convergent and
controlled industrialization, and embedded in a planet
of fields.

Defeating
eco-fascism means things will have to change. That should be welcome to anyone
who understands mass eco-fascism as a psycho-social commitment to a certain
“way of life” at any cost. Many would be willing to surrender the fool’s gold
of a car-centric suburban capitalist modernity for a life with less gewgaws and
less alienation, but more clean air, more green spaces, more walking, and maybe
more, but not too much more, hard work, as well, of course, as a planet in
decent shape for the future. That is a future worth fighting for.

Max Ajl has
a PhD in Development Sociology at Cornell University, and writes on the
Tunisian national liberation struggle and post-colonial development. He is
currently working on a book about ecological planning in the Anthropocene.